The Education of Millionaires - Michael Ellsberg [130]
In this increasingly unpredictable and chaotic world, the wisest choice for thriving and flourishing is to focus your efforts on cultivating skills, habits, and ways of being that will work for you under a wide range of market circumstances and economic realities, and which will allow you to bounce back and adapt to changes, shifts, shocks, crashes, and new opportunities as they arise. This is called cultivating resilience.
I predict many of the critics of my book will incorrectly say I reduce education to mere “vocational training.” My book, in fact, recommends the opposite of vocational training. Vocational training prepares you for a specific job—even though many of the jobs people are now training for may not exist in five or ten years! The courses in this book prepare you for success in any job, including jobs we can’t even imagine because they don’t exist yet. It is a completely adaptable set of personal and professional skills for life in the real world, applicable under any market conditions, any economic landscape, any personal circumstances.
What I hope I’ve given you in this book is the keys toward economic and career resilience. If one thing is sure, it’s that we’re all going to need a lot of resilience, flexibility, and adaptability if we want to survive and thrive amid the waves of change (both destructive and constructive) that are coming our way.
Our education system, as it stands, from kindergarten through graduate school, is the opposite of resilience, flexibility, and adaptability. It teaches a narrow set of academic/analytic skills, mostly divorced from the practicalities of life, and drills them into you for hours, days, weeks, months, and years on end. Analytic skills may be valuable to success in a rapidly changing, chaotic world, but they are far, far from the whole picture. Success, happiness, contribution, innovation, and leadership depend on a range of human skills, most of which are not taught in school.
Thiel says: “To question formal education in our society—it’s the one thing that’s really taboo in our society. And if you want to have a candidate for something that’s really a bubble, you need incredible belief. In the nineties, people really believed in technology. This last decade, people really believed in housing. The precondition for a bubble is intense belief without any possibility for questioning it. Our beliefs about education fall under this category right now.
“I worry that our thinking about education has gotten to be 100 percent outsourced. People just follow the tracked programs other people tell them to do, without questioning it at all. I worry that we’ve forgotten how to think for ourselves about education, and we need to recover that.
“My number-one candidate for a bubble in the United States today is higher education. It is believed incredibly intensely. To question it is to put yourself outside the circle of respectable belief.
“But there’s obviously a lot to question. What it comes down to, I believe, is not left versus right, but establishment versus nonestablishment. Things that require an established track to enter into, versus things that require a lot of innovation. The tracked establishment in the United States has badly failed. It doesn’t work that well anymore, it’s not that compelling.”
Peter introduced me to Sean Parker, who was the founding president of Facebook when Peter invested in the company. I met with Sean in his new town house in the West Village in Manhattan. (For those who are curious: I personally found Sean to be the direct opposite of the vapid slickster Justin Timberlake portrays him as in The Social Network. I found him to be pensive, philosophical, self-aware, and intensely intellectually curious—recommending book after book to me that he felt I needed to read. Out of respect for his time, I kept trying to end the interview,